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The Bird of Paradise

Chapter XVI

Chapter XVI.

"So Grand the Toga-Sweep of his great style,

So vast the theme on which his song was fed."

"Now, listen to the plaintiff's case,
Observe the features of her face—
Little Woman!
Condole with her distress of mind;
From bias free of every kind
This trial must be tried."

After Eugene left the court he spent an hour in the office of Chancery Square, consulting with his legal champion concerning the rationale of his address for the following eventful day. They emerged about sunset from the office, when together they noticed an inky bar over the setting sun—the index of coming torrential rain. Through the evening the wind blew with the sweep of a tornado. Through the night came shimmering lightning, reverberating thunder and driving, rattling hail, and on the following morning uncertain weather accompanied by the monotonous drip, drip, drip of the rain, and the stale formalities of the national court ushering in the panegyric of the senior counsel for Eugene and the attack upon the philippic of Clack, abounding as it was in bad inductive logic, fallacious syllogisms and irrational assumptions, and in other parts in threadbare themes, tautology, and hackneyed hyperbolism; bringing them all down, tumbling down piecemeal one after another in great comminuted avalanches.

"May it please your Honour!" said the prodigious reclusive scholar.— Suddenly turning to the intellectual quartette, the belted knights sitting in defence of their country's honour, and assuming his most orthodox jury-droop and most charming smile upon the constituted Supreme Court of the State of Louisiana, he began with the poetical exhortation—

"Hear the other side of the story
That sullies a brother's fame;
Oft a robe of innocent whiteness
Lies under a garb of shame."

"Gentlemen of the jury, constituted as you are in your country's cause page 445the Supreme Court of this immortal State of Louisiana, it is now my duty to solicit your attention to a brief outline of the character of my client, and the false charges which his treacherous wife has brought before you against him, and to give you a brief outline of the paradisal home in which he has lived ever since he has been married to this flouting, taunting, flaunting, unwomanly woman, who in her youthful days adopted for herself the name of the bird of Paradise, although some say it was given her by an old scare-crow of an aunt. As the immortal bard of the green isle says—

'Farewell! ye vanishing flowers, that shone
In my fairy wreath so bright and brief;
Oh! what are the brightest that e'er have blown,
To the lote-tree spring by the Paradise throne?'

I had the pleasure, gentlemen of the jury, of being most intimately acquainted with him when we were fellow-students at the university, and I have known him well for nearly twenty years. At the University of Philadelphia he was an ornament in the school of arts and one of the most distinguished science scholars of one of the affiliated colleges. He won numerous medals, exhibitions and prizes. He was the winner with first-class honours of the two final scholarships, with all their rich emoluments, in the school of language and logic and the school of natural science. He took the degree of Bachelor of Arts, and was the first in the first-class honour-lists at the same time; after which he proceeded to the degree of Master of Arts of the far-famed University of Philadelphia, winning the gold medal for natural science. In the universities of Great Britain he carried away many distinctions. He obtained the degrees of Bachelor of Medicine and Master of Surgery at the great university of London, as well as the diplomas of Member of the Royal Irish Academy of Surgeons and Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons of England. He has spent years in the study of his profession at the great medical schools and hospitals of London, Dublin, Edinburgh, Paris, Berlin and Vienna. He was lieutenant and surgeon to the Imperial military forces during the late war in Afghanistan, and he was awarded a silver clasp for distinguished services at the battle of Charasiab. Subsequently he attained to the high distinctions of Doctor of Medicine of the University of Philadelphia and Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians of London. For ten years in the State of Louisiana he has been in active practice and carrying out the duties of medical officer of health for the national government, while all the time he has been an active and prominent member of the council of the Philadelphia University, the State branch of the National Medical Association, and a popular lieutenant of the Louisiana cavalry. His prominence in his profession should be a sufficient answer to these charges—a profession which if it does not conduce to the amassing of wealth, as Sir James Paget said, 'belongs to the nobler ambition of being counted among the learned and the good who strive by combining science with public utility and charity to make the future better and nobler page 446than the past.' His career since he vacated the universities and medical colleges has been equally brilliant. His successes in the Augusta hospital and the large quantity of evidence adduced as to the capital operations which he has performed—some of his original methods having been the subjects of long dissertations by the various medical societies, and now described in standard works on surgery—stamp him as a man of most excellent ability. If he has been a brusque and freespoken man unversed in the alphabet of love, and if he has not been a plaything for the little vanities of women, he is a man of a great depth of devotion—a tower of strength whatever betide built upon the solid bedrock of natural goodness and unswerving faith in those he loved, and a pillar of protection from the missiles and the shafts of the world for those in whom his heart was placed. Can you, gentlemen, listen to the evidence of the large number of grateful patients who have attended the court to sound his praises and then turn away and declare that the man is a drunkard? His persecutors have concocted charges and suborned perjured hirelings to swear to them. How can a man attend to a medical practice such as his was at Sabinnia, with an income of fifteen thousand five hundred dollars a year, and yet be a drunkard? The idea is preposterous. His wife has had the audacity to come before you bedecked in all her gorgeous colours—

'Through whom all beauty's beams concentred pass
Dazzling and rich, as through love's burning-glass.'

Bitten with the pernicious itch for notoriety, this soi-disant bird of Paradise has the effrontery, I say, to come before you with her multiplying eyes and swear on her solemn oath that her husband was drunk unremittingly for nine years—Great Bacchus riding on a goat! drunk for nine years! That old crier there, gentlemen, might as well have said—' The evidence, bird of Paradise, which you shall give before the court and jury sworn shall be lies, all lies and nothing but lies, because you are not expected in the national court of the State of Louisiana to tell the truth.' Now, gentlemen, when a woman can come here and swear to such an outrageous statement as that, you need not be surprised at her other oaths on the subject of cruelty. In the celebrated cases of surgical operations with which he has been credited, a steady hand, a bold nerve, and a cool, collected head are the main factors that work for success. Every one of these numerous and unexceptional cases has been a signal victory over disease. His hand is steady, his brain is clear, and observe—his eye is a bright blue. No traces of tippling blotches on his smooth complexion! no sign of alcohol in any shape or form! You heard his clear and explicit evidence in the witness-box, his circumspect and well-chosen replies, as in the warmth of his indignation he outwitted the aspersions of my learned friends, and established incontrovertible proofs of his absolute innocence of these accusations. How can a man do all these things and yet be a drunkard for nine years? It is an abominable lie on the part of his wife, who has bribed with the money she should have spent on her home and on her children crawling, squirming, sneaking, unprincipled pimps, page 447lying mouchards, common informers, and what not, to make the law courts, contaminated as they are, rotten again with perjury. For months, like a pack of hounds in full cry, they have laid traps for him, spreading their trawls for him all over the country, and have lain in wait for him to 'nab' him, as they call it, in the dark. She has brought midnight marauders into his house in order to turn the scene created by herself to her own advantage after-wardsin the court. They have imagined he was doing evil when he was doing good, in order to present falsified evidence against him, and enhance their reward from his vindictive and nefarious persecutors. For fifty years this tainted stream of rottenness and corruption has flowed in silently upon us, and settling in the lower levels of society it has been washed by the waves of fortune into places of wealthy alliance, high station and unmerited power; the efforts of our judges to stem its onward progress are as futile as an attempt to stop the Gulf Stream. In coming to the second charge of cruelty, the legal interpretation of which will be explained to you by his Honour when he summarises the evidence, I will draw your attention to this account-book, in order to show you the nature of the man. There, at the end of the last month of summer, you will see the work of the day neglected, and a cross to mark his baby's death, as well as a week's practice neglected while he sat by its suffering side. This is the man whose wife says that he threw the child out on the middle of the road—the very man whose work makes him the first and the last friend of humanity. Gentlemen, I blush for her! she can't blush for herself. Further, I will draw your attention to the tender incident at the grave, where he gathered buttercups from the mound over his lost little child and preserved them in order to send them to his absent wife, in one of those genuinely pathetic letters. He is a man impulsive and warm-blooded—perhaps leonine in temper, but never strategic nor crawling, and it would be impossible for him to do anything mean or cruel. These little traits in his character show him to be a man of a tender and soft-hearted disposition, while his wife's venom and malignity have been oppressing him in all his efforts to please her. Home after home he has established and relinquished for her, and has at different times kept two open for her at Galveston; while, serene in the whirl of her giddy gaieties and jollities at Edenhall, she has spurned his luxurious homes or has looked upon them as hotels kept for her convenience when It behoved her to remain by his side. From house to house she has gone with the malicious object of damaging his reputation and raining his practice; she has shown towards him the blackest treachery, and she has consorted with women of her own inclinations in her attempts to break down, 'good, easy man,' her unsuspicious husband. Gentlemen, we cannot gather grapes from thistles! Because he would not bow his knee before the false god of her money, and urged by the dire necessity of the enforced absence of his little ones, he has been by her, gentlemen,—by her alone. I say—goaded into applying to the Supreme Court, and to undergo a vast expense for the custody of the children whom he dearly loved. Finding his means exhausted by protracted page 448litigation, she is prompted by evil advisers to assume the mask of reconciliation and return to her home, three years after those children had been restored, in order that she might play the cards in her sinuous game on a better vantage ground in his house, at the very time when all his munitions of war had been blown to the winds. None but a mean woman could have practised such treachery, lie-acting, and chicanery, and the petitioner is mean to the tips of her fingers. The colour of her money was very hard to see until now, and she was never known to do a kind action on behalf of anybody. She was always a money-spinner on vanities for herself; money for money's sake was her motto, and all her tastes were of the earth earthy. Not one act of charity was she ever known to perform, not one kind word of her husband did this modern Delilah ever utter. Calumny, malignity, backbiting and lying she freely practised among those outside whom she found willing to listen; vituperation and opprobrium reigned in her cantankerous breast whenevershe was at her home. He is himself a man more sinned against than sinning against others. Not a mark can she show, not a scratch after nine years of married life; not one single witness can she bring to support her audacious charge. For acts of cruelty she relies on a few instances when, provoked and aggravated by her own violent behaviour, he retorted in the height of his aroused passion and, on the impulse of the moment, used before this supersubtle woman words which he regretted immediately afterwards. His worst act of cruelty about which she has made such a noise was the fact that one New Year's eve he brought into the drawing-room the whole contingent of the country brass band, knowing she was so fond of music and might not object to it in the dead of the night. Instead of the bird of Paradise, as she was called by herself and her own relations, she has shown herself to be a venomous and vicious creeping glistening serpent ready to strike at the happiness and reputation of her husband on the slightest provocation, or no provocation at all—

'Or, as the Nile-bird loves the slime, that gives
That rank and venomous food on which she lives.'

Look, gentlemen of the jury, at the lasting scar on her husband's face— the relic of a terrible gash which in her ebullient and demoniacal temper she inflicted with a bludgeon of a bowie-knife after hurling in a vertigo of passion through the window two costly porcelaine ornaments—a pair of presents which he had brought home for his little children. To offend the bird of Paradise was to find a savage. She has no symbol of violence to show; but as for that paradisal autograph, what can—

'Wholly do away I ween
The marks of that which once hath been?'

No just provocation was offered her then; her only motive was a maudlin jealousy at his bringing presents home to his little ones. Them she has tried her hardest to embitter against their father. She has poisoned their young and pliable minds with the venom of her own. To worry him by page 449undermining their love, to make them inimical to their father, to inculcate hatred of him in their innocent lives, and to propagate filial insurrection, were her fanciful pleasures. She took all the pains she could to effect her black designs when they were young and impressionable. The little ones he loved as only a father can love. His children he spent his last dollar to redeem; the progeny of his own flesh and blood, whom he would have fallen to save—these she has made the tools for her vengeance, knowing what cruel weapons they would make against him. With her wanton tongue she comes before you, gentlemen of the jury, and swears that he ill-used them and neglected them, while we have oceans of evidence to establish the truth of his indulgences, his tenderness, and his burning love for them both. Not satisfied with wreaking her vengeance on her husband, she shamefully absents herself from her home as soon as she is left that money, and concocts a scheme for the spoliation of the character of an innocent and dutiful girl. Her name she tries to drag down from its pedestal of purity to emblazon and blacken it in the newspapers, and she has employed meretricious mouchards to aid her in her infamous work. Look, gentlemen, at the unfortunate position in which that young girl would have been placed were it not for the strong testimony of those great authorities on anatomical science before whom, clothed in the robe of her virtue, she offers herself unhesitatingly for examination, and comes out of the ordeal as pure and perfect as a child. Can you impugn the evidence of men like those illustrious scientists of the human frame when you heard them declare on their oaths that Lillie Delaine is a virgin? Ye gods! can you believe the lying evidence of those paid informers, those suspects and human vampires, and the false evidence of those witnesses brought into requisition by the petitioner, or attach any importance to the silly remarks of that nurse - girl — one of the veriest prudes ever known—whose dismissal Lillie Delaine had effected, in the face of the potential testimony of such clinicians as those? Can you doubt as men of the world that the attitude of this woman towards her husband was the result of any other cause than the legacy bequeathed to her by her opulent father? He married her for love when she was virtually a portionless girl, and she rounded upon him when she got hold of the money. What boots it with incessant care to gratify the bird of Paradise?

'Love's wing and the peacock's are nearly alike:
They are both of them bright, but they're changeable too,
And whenever a new beam of beauty may strike,
It will tincture love's plumes with a different hue.'

Gentlemen, the time is speeding away. I do not think it at all necessary to expatiate upon the legal points in this case. I will take no advantage of the fact that any faults of the respondent were condoned by his wife's return and co-habitation. Nor will I dwell upon the fact that she contributed to any wrongs of which he may have been guilty. Even George Washington himself and every one of us has faults of his own, more or page 450less. I will simply ask you to say that my old friend and fellow-student here, whom you have seen every day for seven weeks, is not the man he is represented to be by his detractors: that he is not an habitual drunkard: nor guilty of cruelty, nor guilty of adultery. He has been guilty of no more than a little indiscriminate hobnobbing, and as for the fragmentary evidence regarding cruelty, the most that can be said is that when he inveighed against her own cruelties his language was not very flattering. As to the legal arguments of condonation, my theory is that there was nothing to condone, and as to contribution on his wife's part I say that there were no faults of any great consequence to which she might have contributed. This inelastic and intolerant woman yclept the bird of Paradise could do no wrong! I will conclude by alluding to the blackguardly attack made upon that sublime and spotless woman, the spiritual influence of whose personal endowments, adorned with a beauty which is rarely seen has, in bye-gone days, shed its irradiating glow over the youthful life of myself and my esteemed friend at the university; and a woman in whom there is no more sin than there is brandy and soda in the honeycomb.

'Her eyes' blue tenderness, her long fair hair,
And the wan lustre of her features—caught
From contemplation—where serenely wrought,
Seems sorrow's softness charm'd from its despair-
Have thrown such speaking sadness in her air,
That—but I know her blessed bosom fraught
With mines of unalloyed and stainless thought—
I should have deemed her doomed to earthly care.
When from his beauty-breathing pencil born,
The Magdalen of Guido saw the morn—
Such seemeth she—but how much more excellent
With nought Remorse can claim, nor Virtue scorn!'"

In his flamboyant peroration the scholarly George Wilmington, who had been at high-water mark all through the case, reached the boiling-point, and trembled with genuine red-hot indignation. All the emotion of his nature was aroused and his blood boiled in the flights of his eloquence. He had taken some days in the delivery of his address, and when it was concluded the leading counsel for the petitioner made an application to the judge for the postponement of his speech—the final speech for the petitioner—until the following day. In his opening address his colleague had done a great deal towards the proper besmearing of the respondent with mud; but he wished to make final preparation for the process of tarring him all over, so that none of Wilmington's white paint could be seen.

Judge Grant agreed to the proposition. He readily acquiesced in the postponement of the second attack on Eugene, and the crier adjourned the court till the following day at half-past nine in the morning.

When Eugene was leaving the court he chanced to meet his former friend and legal adviser, the junior working partner of the firm of Warne, Costall page 451and Davitt. Although he had been shamefully deserted at a momentous and critical time by Costall, the senior partner of the successful firm, because he was on financial rocks, he still retained a slight acquaintance with Davitt.

"Your case," remarked Davitt. "has been irretrievably spoilt by the fact that the attention of the judge has not been drawn to the law points sufficiently. The discursive poetry will have no effect. The clause in the act relating to contribution and the clause relating to condonation should have been fully dilated upon before the judge and the jury. You have not brought into the evidence any particulars relating to your wife's frequent and prolonged desertions from home ever since you were married. The judge and the jury will assume that she never was long away from home, and so did not contribute to anything. They will think you chased her away just before the death of her father; they don't know that you parted with her on ostensibly friendly terms when she left your house just before she got the money. You made a blunder yourself by refusing to say anything bad about her: very noble and chivalrous, but no good at law. You should have given a full account of her frolics and love-passages with that interloping coxcomb. You should not have admitted drinking anything but the German lager beer; you should have thrown out some insinuations that it was doctored by Gloriana Bloobumper, and you should have laid more stress upon your mother's evidence and the evidence of Jonathan Scatter to prove an alibi; your mother should have proved the nature of the covert meetings with Lillie Delaine That jury too will, I believe, fancy that the evidence of the medical men is only a case of esprit du corps. I am seriously afraid those questions of condonation and contribution will weigh heavily with the judge. If he thinks that your wife did not contribute to anything—and there is nothing put before him to show that she did contribute—he will place her before the jury as a perfect saintess and an injured innocent dove. Their sympathies, I'll warrant, are already aroused by that affectation of sobbing and blubbering on the part of your wife, and if they feel at all predisposed to side with her your case is lost. I could have won it with Grinder alone, as there is no moral doubt how it should have gone. Another thing, I have heard that they have been trying to tamper with Obadiah Slocum and Ernest Cuddle. Can you lend us a dollar?" and the junior partner flippantly walked away saying he was on the track with Silas P. Grinder and had an appointment at a quarter past eight with somebody else in the city.

The newspapers were still afflicted with the bonus fever and the mawkish sympathy for Marvel. After painting the opening address of the counsel for the petitioner in glowing colours, printing little notes in the agony column like advertisements drawing public attention to the report, and all along suppressing as much as they could of the evidence given in the respondent's favour, they appeared that evening and the next morning with the bald and empty statement that Lawyer Wilmington had addressed the jury. The one-sided accounts and inspired commentaries of the papers— page 452in some of which the parties were what is called in America 'leadered'— were read every evening by every juryman in the bosom of his family.

In the little poky room rented from the grizzly old woman in Lynching Lane, which he entered by pulling the string and thus withdrawing the bolt of the draw-bads lock, Eugene sat moody, sombre and silent; the words of the acute Davitt and those of his father ringing like mournful death-knell tolling bells in his ears. Clear in conscience as he felt he was, the words of his former successful solicitor and the wisdom of his father intoned themselves into his restless brain, as had echoed the incantations of the officiating priest in the Sacred Heart cathedral during the incubation of the typhoid fever in his collegiate days. He prayed to God that the warning would prove untrue as he lay fatigued on that ricketty, hot and uneasy bed and night-long heard the bells of the town hall tower toll and chime and toll.

The following morning, as he entered the quarter-dollar casino-restaurant, where he had been a regular attendant for coffee every morning since the first of April, when the case was commenced, everybody in the immense dining-hall seemed to know him. He caught them now and then casting sheep's-eyes in his direction. The waiter had suddenly become extraordinarily particular in knocking the crumbs off the table-cloth with a dirty towel and in bringing him the morning newspapers, where that morning he saw notified the mere fact that "lawyer Wilmington had addressed the jury."

Showering rain up till the time he arrived at the casino, and now the measured dismal drip, drip, drip as if in the sympathy of Nature for the unjustly treated man wending his way to the gloomy divorce court.

There he found the large forgathering of the "leisure classes" inside and outside the court and loitering in the corridors and the cloisters clustering around the quadrangle, with their pointed minarets shooting into the weeping, misty air, eagerly expectant of a brief oration by the counsel for the petitioner, a brief epitomization by the judge, and a brief retirement of the jury. The speech of Carrick, the second counsel for the petitioner, occupied two more days, and thus, as the tension of the wearisome case dragged its slow length along it reached the fiftieth day of hearing and still was posted up as 'part heard' on the tripods among the aloes and palms of the quadrangle.

Supported on either side by his academical confrères, by the whole of the rest of the belt of lawyers, Hallam, Brassy, Hoare, Craig and Clark in front of him, and the paradisal bird looming out extremely conspicuous and busy amongst them all, the gladiatorial member of the bar stood armed with a copious profusion of notes and memoranda and an enormous brief. Prompted in his delivery by every other member of the coalesced firms, with Lord Dundreary at regular intervals tugging away at his coat-tails and whispering something into his ear, while Marvel whispered in each of their private ears in rotation, after the usual preamble of an obeisance before the judge and the cessation of the desultory chatter page 453in the galleries, the blasé Carrick delivered his counterblast to Wilmington's address:—

"May it please your Honour! Gentlemen of the jury"—with his thumbs in his waistcoat and his boot on the seat sitting up with one leg lame—the canine post plastique for the jury—"My learned, poetical and erudite friend has evidently thought he would spring a mine upon us in this case by bringing four of the great medical guns of the city here to blow us all clean out of the water. Now, gentlemen, I don't care two straws for all the medical bunkum and bluster in the whole world (great guffaw from Lord Dundreary). I have enough proofs of adultery to hang any man. I will draw your attention to a case recorded in the year 1789, when a Dr. Trotter was mistaken in this respect. As strong evidence against the opinions of these medical experts I shall refer to that of the nurse-girl who gave her evidence with such remarkable clearness and precision—a girl who is quite disinterested in this matter, although an attempt has been made to show that her evidence has been biassed on account of her dismissal from the service of the petitioner on information laid against her by the notorious Lillie Delaine. The unmistakable evidence of the two honourable professional detectives corroborates that of the servant. Can any man in his sane senses believe that this misdemeanant left his house that night in Mobile with any but unworthy motives for consorting with that well-known jade in some disreputable kennel in the city? Why, bless my soul, all through this trial he has been living in a low neighbourhood! The secret meetings which he held with this wicked woman in the thick of the forest at Mobile point clearly to the one conclusion—namely, adultery. On these grounds alone (Lord Dundreary tugging away) I might ask you to return a verdict of guilty; but, gentlemen, these undeniable proofs are further strengthened by the evidence of the immaculate lady from Galveston—the disinterested lady, whose honour my learned friend has shamefully endeavoured to impeach. I refer to our witness, Margery Moon. What need I care for Dr. Norman Dawn or Dr. Lionel Garland or Dr. Gabriel Marchbank or Dr. Godfrey Meredith, or the whole of the college of surgeons and scientists of America or the world, when I can adduce before you such proofs as these? What did the rascal make assignations for but for secret and adulterous purposes? Was it such pure platonic love that he felt for this girl that he found it desirable to consort with her like Rosalind in the woods and under the black veil of the night? (tke lord winks at the bird). Gentlemen, don't we all know upon great authority too that men love darkness better than light because their deeds are evil? Insinuations have been made that these witnesses are all paid: that the domestic servants at Myamyn were purposely overpaid, and that they are not speaking the truth. Is it possible, I ask you, gentlemen, that any of these praise-worthy witnesses—these respectable women and these honorable men—would renunciate their immortal souls for gold? If not, you gentlemen must, as the Supreme Court of the great State of Louisiana, return a verdict for my client on the evidence. Are we not all paid, gentlemen? page 454so that if that insinuation is allowed to damage the credibility of our witnesses, it must logically apply also to yourselves, gentlemen, as members of the jury, gentlemen, and the inviolate, infallible, immaculate Supreme Court of Louisiana. You are all paid by our client, and by our client alone! ('clap on more sail,' from Brassy). Had it not been, gentlemen, for the wasted life of that scoundrel sitting there, his money should have also contributed towards the costs and expenses of this national cause: you should have been paid with his money, but he has been rogue enough to swindle you, gentlemen, out of your just dues: not a cent, gentlemen, does this slouching dipsomaniac possess to relieve the terrible burden of costs our unfortunate client has single-handed to endure. Gentlemen, did you notice when my colleagues and myself were cross-examining the artful respondent we could not corner him into an admission of anything whatsoever? nor could we nail him down to one single acknowledgement. He would not rise to our fancy flies. Did you notice how he crossed swords and fenced with us and parried our home-thrusts with counter-thrusts and stoccadoes, and how he fended our incendiary shells? No sooner did it strike us, gentlemen, that we had him fixed than he would wriggle out of our hands and slip away again like an eel. (Lord Dundreary at it again). I do not wish to say that he is not a capable man in his profession when he keeps away from the drink. (Bird of Paradise frowns and pulls his coat-tail). His wife says so; but, gentlemen, I think it unnecessary to say so. I say more than this—I say that that scapegrace sitting there, gentlemen, is a man of great ability. Whitworth is the man we have to fight with his string of university degrees as long as your arm, not my scholarly friend, renowned as he is in all the provinces of the law. All the greater shame for the blackguard, gentlemen, to have lived the drunken useless life which he has lived, and all the greater reason why he should have supported and cherished his wife, the bird of Paradise, gentlemen! and his children more than he has done. Just imagine yourselves, gentlemen, with those academical honours around your necks. Would you lay yourselves down in the gutter with them? I hear your answer, gentlemen, and it is a right noble answer! You have seen him sitting there for nearly two months. No doubt he has given you the impression that he is not so black as he has been painted. Gentlemen, the devil never is as black as he is painted! you must remember, gentlemen, that this Portuguese lushington has been on his good behaviour here and that in every place where he has lived during the past nine years we have put witnesses into the box to swear that they have frequently seen him the worse for liquor. His partner, gentlemen, after sacrificing one half share in his scientific business for a paltry sum of money has told us that in his opinion—and, gentlemen, this is the disinterested opinion of a medical expert—that man sitting there is a confirmed, incurable and hopeless drunkard. By this inveterate habit he ruined the practice in which the eminent Professor Jonas Peck had the misfortune to vouchsafe him one-half share. He had not joined that distinguished witness as partner more than six months, gentlemen, when page 455it was found necessary to bring about a dissolution. What better authority can you have on this head than that medical gentleman, unsurpassed as he is in his profession; who has for six months watched carefully every day every action and every move of this man who is fairly lousy with vices of all sorts. (A wful guffaw from Lord Dundreary and over goes the book-show upon the floor). If there be any bias on the part of the nurse-girl what bias can there be on the part of a high-class witness like Dr. Jonas Peck? the surgeon-general of the Louisiana cavalry brigade, who at one time conferred a great favour upon the respondent by honouring him with a partnership, but who, gentlemen, since he found it necessary to wash his hands of this lousy sweep—rotting in the cesspool of his own degradation—has no connection with him nor with his wife one way or another. As to the charge of cruelty, gentlemen of the jury, I do not wish to deceive your minds with the impression that the respondent has been in the habit of knocking his wife about, flogging her, or in any way assaulting her with violence. I will simply draw your attention to the evidence of our pitiable client touching the incident of the night of Easter eve —I refer to the burning of the hall-decorations and the hurling of the baby as described by my client in the dead of a miserable night upon the middle of a miserable road; his hindrance of her when attempting to enter the house again that wretched night, and his forcing his wife to stay out all night, of which exposure her baby died; again, to the incident of the great yataghan pulled out of its sheath as described by my client with the murderous intention of running her through, and what is more important, gentlemen, the fact that the servants saw this pot-valiant gamin after one of his soldiering fiascos standing over that bare blood-thirsty blade lying on the surgery floor; lastly, to the abusive epithets he has hurled at our client from time to time, as corroborated by the reputable witnesses Gloriana Bloobumper and Esmeralda Knight, in his ungovernable fits of unaroused temper: (sympathy, sympathy, sympathy, whispered all the tail-tugging firm). Gentlemen, it is not my intention to evoke your sympathies or excite your pity for that meek and lowly young girl (33) whose scalding floods of tears at her deplorable condition and in sorrow for her vile husband you have seen so frequently in the witness-box and on the floor of the court; (and on the head of the crier)—tears, gentlemen, which have watered and weakened her own story to the' court. I will simply say that it is utterly impossible for her to be ever re-united with that worthless animal, and I will ask you to dissolve this so-called holy bond of marriage as it is alone in your power to do and thus liberate not only our client but the animal himself from the life-long burden of an unhappy union. My learned friend has not pressed the legal questions of condonation and contribution on my client's part, so that I need not trespass further on your time, which you have so nobly and so generously devoted to this and your country's cause." (Tableau! the mouchoir out again).

Here all the other ingredients of the combined firm, as if they had suddenly thought of something forgotten, simultaneously sprang at Carrick, page 456pulling the coat sleeves of the rhetorical fighting champion and trying as if to chew off a bit of his ear, whereat he concluded with a memorable peroration by shouting in big top notes—"I will conclude, gentlemen, by again reminding you of the fact that my client has deposited the sum of eighteen hundred bright jingling dollars in the office of the State sheriff in the court, such sum to be divided amongst you, and that each gentleman of the jury— paramount part and parcel as he is of the constituted Supreme Court of this mighty State of Louisiana—as soon as the verdict is properly given will be paid his fees in full, because as much has been deposited in the office as will cover the sum total of the costs to date and there are plenty more bright ringing dollars where the others came from, as I need hardly say. Their beauty no age can wither nor custom stale their infinite variety. As my learned friend has offered you so much poetical incense I will conclude with a little couplet of my own composition—

You can do without a wife and you can do without a drink
But you can't do without the jolly chink-chink-chink."

Carrick's arguments were interlarded with specimens of tiresome braggadocio and repeated ad nauseam. His methods were those of what Shakespeare called "damnable iteration," with the hopes that some of the mud thrown would stick, but the jury were so thick-headed that they felt and could well afford to feel not in the slightest degree bored and partook of his palavering, hectoring and blatant réchauffé without showing any signs of "dropping off gorged" whatsoever. The final attack of the counsel for the petitioner was voted by his superior in eloquence, George Wilmington and the junior counsel for the defence (who had never had an opportunity of lifting up his voice or cross-examining a single witness, but who assiduously all the time had busied himself diving into the deeps of the seas of affidavits and judgments) as an egregiously weak production. Albeit the other side had the advantage of the last say to the jury, they both volunteered to Eugene the opinion that the case was going on very satisfactorily for him, and that they had no manner of doubt whatever about winning the day.

At the conclusion of the address to the jury the court adjourned for lunch, and at half-past two it was announced by Judge Grant that he would require three days to compend a synopsis of the evidence. On that account he would not be prepared to deliver his compendium until the following Thursday, unto which day he would be compelled to prorogue the court for the hour of half-past nine.

The three days passed demurely away. Each oppressive tropical May morning as Eugene walked by force of habit to the national court, spending the days on fatigue duty, listening to other cases in other courts and strolling back again to his little room in Lynching Lane as the sun was going down veiled in a summer haze, and beyond the long ridge of waters of the gulf there glowed the deep magenta of the western sky; still the prophecies of his father and the recusant vaticinations of his former solicitor reverberated in his ears with every step and every eerie thought.

page 457

Eastward again in his triumphant march glowed the morning sun, risen high enough to illuminate one footpath, as on that black-letter day—that day of days, that day which in spite of the prescience of his barristers he felt to be pregnant with fear, and the principal day in the crisis of his life —he walked to the court without any breakfast, for all his pocket-money was gone. Again on the fifty-fifth day of the great matrimonial campaign the national court was, if possible, more closely packed that it had been on some of the former occasions. Judge Grant entered with an armful of notes of his own and legal exhibits after the jury had taken their seats in the pound.

Three clear days and three clear nights every member of that jury had been at liberty! The door, as it were, was open for the abuse of their sworn functions, although for that matter they had been released every evening from the court control and had thus been amenable to the influences of which old Christopher and Anthony Davitt had spoken.

Pin-drop silence! Not a stir; not a sound could be heard anywhere beneath the dome of the solemn court as the oracle prepared to deliver his authoritative circumlocutory and illuminatory epitomization to the jury, and indirectly to the assembled audience, and to pull the skin of mystification over the eyes of Obadiah Slocum and his mates.

"Gentlemen of the jury," he began sotto voce and with a twinkle in his eye, "you have patiently listened to one of the most painful cases of mésalliance and mal-assimilation over which it has been my lot to preside in this court for divorce and matrimonial causes jurisdiction. From the first the union between this man and his wife appears to have been an ill-assorted one; but nothing seems to have transpired between the parties of any great consequence till they went to reside at Sabinnia. In these cases the husband it must be understood is placed at a great disadvantage naturally. The petitioner is a young and feeble woman of some monetary pretensions, and in a great many ways deserving of our sympathy: while the respondent is a strong young man, who chiefly by his own personal exertions has raised himself high in the noble profession to which be belongs—a profession which regards character and inherent worth as the goal of the true ambition. He holds some of the highest medical degrees and diplomas in the world, and has made for himself a name in the domain of surgery and upon the field of battle, but a name cloyed with alcohol, for there is evidence that at times he has been too fond of 'Johnny Barleycorn.' According to an act of Congress any man or woman is entitled to a dissolution of marriage upon the grounds of habitual intemperance, cruelty, or adultery. Upon the ground of habitual intemperance, or upon the ground of habitual cruelty, or upon the ground of repeated acts of adultery, or upon all the grounds conjointly, this young woman is entitled by law to sue for a divorce from her husband. Her solicitors have decided for her to petition the court upon them all and severally. Conviction of habitual intemperance alone or of cruelty alone will suffice to procure a decree. In order to entitle her to a divorce she page 458must prove that for a term of two years her husband has been an habitual drunkard, or during the like period that he has been guilty of habitual cruelty. Now, my definition of an habitual drunkard is 'a man who habitually gets drunk.' A question arises as to whether the legislature in passing this act implied that the habit must be continuous for two years, or whether it may be calculated by adding together detached and separate periods during a long range of years—say nine years in the case of the respondent, who has been married for that length of time. In my opinion it is not necessary for the habit to be continuous. It does not matter how long the interval is between his carousals, my definition of an habitual drunkard would still be unaffected; even for example if in a range of nine years we add together the first year and the ninth year, or skipping over an interval of four years up to the middle of the epoch and over a later interval of three years, or taking the first two years and allowing that he has never been under the influence of liquor for seven years. He is still in my purview of the law an habitual drunkard! If we recapitulate the fragmentary evidence of the witnesses for the petitioner we will be acting wisely, because the positive evidence in reference to the habit is of incomparably greater weight than wagon-loads of negative evidence, and it is very difficult to prove a negative, even if the witnesses who give the negative testimony had seen the respondent every day of the nine years, for which length of time he has been married. Such witnesses have sworn in large numbers—and we cannot shut our eyes to the fact that they are for the most part ladies and gentlemen of some independent standing in society—that they have known the respondent to be a sober and temperate man for very long periods extending over seven years. Still, as against these reputable witnesses, whose testimony we will shelve, we have some who have given what I maintain is more valuable evidence— namely, that they have actually seen him under the influence of liquor more or less at various times. The difference between being drunk and being under the influence of liquor you must decide for yourselves, as I am never in either condition myself. Eliminating altogether these negative witnesses, and qualifying to a large extent the evidence of his wife, who has sworn that he was drunk every day for nearly a decade, we may add the periods together as follows:—At Augusta there are evidences of five months of intemperate habits, after which we may skip over a period of two and a-half years and reckon upon four months' intemperance at Galveston; after which we skip over a period of one and a-half years and come to another four months at Sabinnia; after which we must take the evidence of his late partner, and allot him a period of six months when practising at New Orleans; after which we skip over a period of one year and allot him three months inebriety at Summer Hill; and after skipping again over a period of two years, we must take the invaluable evidence of persons who saw him daily and in his own house—Myamyn at Mobile. I refer to the evidence of Miss Gloriana Bloobumper and Miss Esmeralda Knight, who gave evidence for the petitioner, and allot him a period of a page 459final two months. Thus you see, gentlemen of the jury, we have from the year 1845 to the year 1854 a series of distinct and separate periods. By adding together the estimated number of months of inebriety and intemperance, according to this process of logical synthesis, we get a total of twenty-four months, or a term of two years as required by the wording of the act, which says that the respondent must be found to be an habitual drunkard for two years; but of course you will take into account the disadvantage under which the respondent labours in the difficulty of proving a negative. It is for you to decide whether or not these hidebound generalities will apply to the respondent, and it is a great relief to me to leave the question to the intelligence of the jury, as I confess I could not conscientiously decide it myself. Cruelty, gentlemen, is a legal term. It does not at law signify bodily cruelty. There is no collateral evidence that the respondent ever injured a hair of this woman's head, although it has been elicited that on a few occasions she was the unprovoked aggressor and violently assaulted him—on one occasion, I regret to say, in a manner that might have ended in his death; but that is beside the question seeing that he should have used antiphlogistic remedies for his petulant wife's anger instead of giving her passions full play. Her own evidence that he tried to kick her on the face when he was dead drunk I regard as too ridiculous to notice. Abusive language towards a wife calculated to bring her into contempt by servants and the like, aspersions on her virtuous character before servants—even if such aspersions be true—insults that humiliate and demean her are at American law cruelty. On this head we have the evidence of the hypercritical wife herself chiefly to depend upon, but the evidence of a wife against her husband must always be taken cum grano and viewed with suspicion; notwithstanding, the premises for our logical syllogism are to a certain extent corroborated by the evidence of the women at Myamyn —those two women were the last servants in the petitioner's employ, and the evidence of domestic servants is of the greatest value in these cases. The petitioner herself has told us that her husband openly insulted her, and has also accused her of immorality; but these points are inadequately substantiated by any other witnesses for the applicant for divorce. The respondent has refused to give any evidence on these matters, and thus he has increased the difficulty of proving a negative. Worse and worse! we have among the exhibits with which you will be furnished when you retire, a letter written by the respondent to his wife asking her to contribute something to the support of the house when she volunteered to return to Myamyn. Now, gentlemen, I consider that by writing that letter he treated her like adog! Upon the question of adultery we have the evidence of private detectives and other sightseers to rely upon chiefly. They say they 'nabbed' him in the scrub, but this is a class of evidence which the court always views with great suspicion and distrust. The evidence of the Galveston woman I altogether discount as unworthy of belief, and the evidence of the nurse-girl as frivolous and prejudiced. On the whole the positive signs and proofs of adultery are invisible and immaterial.

page 460
Against these we have the ponderous evidence of the concurrence of opinion in four of the most eminent clinicians in the city, the evidence of one of whom, as for instance the evidence of Dr. Gabriel Marchbank, who has made the anatomy and conformation of woman a life-long study, is to my mind enough to prove that the respondent has not been guilty of adultery with the young woman Lillie Delaine: the theory of whose unsullied virginity I entirely and cordially endorse. There is not a stigma upon the girl. The efforts of counsel to explode the expert evidence of such scientists as those were as futile as an attempt to blast a rock with a Chinese cracker. If you can exclude the impossible or the extremely improbable from the logical process it is a certainty or a thousand to one chance that whatever remains must be the truth, no matter how improbable it may seem. Although the counsel for the petitioner has indicated a case where a mistake was discovered to have been made by a careless medical man, and has pointed out that all the signs may be fallacious, it does not follow that taken collectively all the signs are fallacious, but that they may be when taken individually. Now the medical evidence in this instance dealt with collective and not individual proofs, and the statement that all the signs are fallacious cannot be made to cut both ways. Mark that point. It is a most unusual and reprehensible practice in a case of this sort or in any other case, for a defendant to act as his own solicitor. The statement of the girl Lillie Delaine concerning her experiences as general servant to the parties when they lived together, and subsequently as working housekeeper to the doctor and his two children, bears to a large extent the imprint of truth; but the fact of the respondent revising the notes which she made must be viewed by you as a jury with great suspicion. There is an uncommonly strong resemblance between the respondent and his brother, the rising young American dentist; but if you carefully observed you will have noticed a very slight moustache on the dentist. I do not think that the detectives could be mistaken in identifying the respondent whom they say they saw talking to the young woman one moonless night at Galveston, and his brother does not appear to be a man addicted to any unworthy form of conduct. If you think that the respondent was at the place indicated instead of his brother, in spite of the evidence of the girl herself, Jonathan Scatter, both of the brothers, and the trustworthy witness Miriam Whitworth, it might afford you a strong link in the evidence of adultery as alleged by the petitioner; and then again, you will be confronted with the difficulty of reconciling the negative evidence with the positive evidence, for if you get the negative evidence into your heads it will drive out the positive evidence, and if you get the positive into your heads it will likewise drive out the negative. If you pick up the thread of the positive evidence and examine it as to its length and fibre you will require to put it down again so that you may pick up the thread of the negative evidence and examine it as to its complex consistence: you cannot tie the two threads together unless you have them both at the same time in your hands, and in your heart-breaking attempts to tie the ends of the positive threads and the ends of the negative page 461threads together you will be perplexed at finding how mysteriously both the positive threads and the negative threads will disappear, and, in short, you will find that you will be all abroad and won't know where you are. I thank God that these subtleties devolve upon your own capacities! and under the mistiness and chaotic confusion of circumstances there would be nothing derogatory in your final determination to retain or abandon either the positive evidence or the negative evidence and decide which of the two you will retain by the time-honoured method of tossing up a cent or a dollar. It has not been pointed out to me by any of the witnesses for the respondent, or the respondent himself, or by his learned counsel, that the petitioner condoned any faults which her husband may have had prior to her return to cohabit with him at Myamyn. She herself has stated that her object in going there was not to forgive her husband nor to cohabit with him, but simply to reside under the same roof so as to keep him under her personal espionage, and the children under her surveillance. It was merely a ruse de guerre, or perhaps we may call it a little autumn manœuvre, insomuch she has stated that at Myamyn all her graces were laid up in lavender. The plea of condonation has not been put before me: therefore I conclude that there was no condonation. No use can be made of such a negative condition at law. If there were positive evidence of condonation it would be sufficient to render nugatory a petition for dissolution of marriage, albeit if that plea were used it would be necessary to show an actual and absolute forgiveness of the past and a return to the mutual loves as in the days of old. Then again, the plea of contribution to any faults which the respondent may have had has not been raised against the petitioner by the respondent, who averred his resolution to make no imputations unduly detrimental to his wife's character, nor by any of his witnesses nor by the learned counsel in his address to the jury. To grant a decree in spite of contribution would be dead against the basic principle of the act. This plea I regard as a strong bar to the granting of a decree for divorce; but as it has not been infringed upon in the evidence or in the address for the defence, I regard the plea as not affecting your decision. You must therefore come to the conclusion that the wife has never at any time since she was married to the respondent by any word, act or deed, contributed in even the slightest degree to any faults of which you may find him guilty. You may go even farther than that, and consider that she has carried out her wifely duties in a perfectly right and proper manner and that in spite of her exertions to preserve domestic peace he has broken through the vows which he made at the altar to love her and cherish her till death. For whatever fanlts you find him to blame he is of his own act alone guilty in this respect. I am very thankful, gentlemen of the jury, that the task of discussing and answering the category of questions which I intend to submit to your consideration rests upon yourselves, for 'in a multitude of counsellors there is wisdom.' It is for you, constituted as you are in reality the Supreme Court of Louisiana, to say Yea or nay to the petition page 462of Marvel Imogen Narramore Whitworth for the scission of her marriage with Eugene Percival Whitworth by your answers to the several questions which I will put before you as follows:—
  • (i) Has the respondent, Eugene Percival Whitworth, for a period of two years and upwards been guilty of habitual drunkenness?
  • (ii) Has the respondent, Eugene Percival Whitworth, for a period of two years and upwards, been guilty of habitual cruelty towards Marvel Imogen Narramore Whitworth, the petitioner?
  • (iii) Has the respondent, Eugene Percival Whitworth, been guilty of adultery with one Lillie Delaine, as stated in the affidavit accompanying the petition?
  • (iv) Has the petitioner, Marvel Imogen Narramore Whitworth, by her return to her husband condoned the alleged intemperance and the alleged cruelty and the alleged adultery of Eugene Percival Whitworth, the respondent?
  • (v) Has the petitioner by her own acts conduced or contributed to any of the wrongs complained of in the petition?

To questions number four and number five I shall expect a negative answer."

The jury were then asked to retire to their room to consider their verdict. In reply to questions by the foreman the apostolic quartette largely representing the order of the angelic life—the Supreme Court of the State of Louisiana—were fully assured three times that they would be provided with alcoholic refreshments, ad libitum, during their confinement.

Just as a telegraph messenger boy brought into the court a cablegram for Eugene, the jury retired from the open court on the understanding that they were to be called again before Grant J. at eight o'clock that night, or four hours afterwards, with the hopes that they would be able to hand in their verdict. The main body of the audience left their seats, passing all sorts of opinions about the round declamations and crotchety peculiarities in the address of the grave and reverend seigneur on the mahogany throne.

Eugene remained. Opening the cablegram which he had received, he found it contained an offer for him to join an expedition under the governorship of Sir George Grey of New Zealand, for the suppression of a threatened uprising among the Kaffirs of the Cape of Good Hope excited by previous maladministration. It further pointed out prospects of a good medical opening at the Cape Colony, and urged him to leave without delay for South Africa.

Hurriedly putting the cablegram in his coat pocket, and absent-mindedly almost forgetting its full purport, he left in company with his legal defenders, both of whom felt some chagrin at the utterances of Judge Grant, while in Eugene's brain rang in uproarious confusion the forebodings of his old father, the fears of the separatist tendencies of the jury, the recusations of his former successful solicitor, and the awestriking sentences of the judge. Leaving the barristers, he met Brosie, page 463who had relinquished his business to spend a few days in the court awaiting the result of the trial. He showed him the cablegram from South Africa.

Deciding to accept the appointment, he telegraphed to his father to bring the children away from Galveston, in order that he might sail away with them to the Cape of Good Hope. He feared that, even if he won the case, the ever-vigilant centaurs, the Philistines, might make an application to the court for an order that the children be made wards of the State, as in the "Evening Apparatus" a cablegram had appeared stating that he had been asked to join the military expedition. This order could have been obtained, as it was within the power of the Supreme Court to make the children wards of the national government of the United States, insomuch they were beneficiares under the will of their maternal grandfather, the great departed Julian Jasper Gould, who had he lived would have squelched the capers of Birdie.

He also sent a cablegram to his old military captain at Aldershot apprising him of the fact that he intended to leave by the first ship, which was advertised to sail from the mouth of the river within three days—the since ill-fated "Rosalind." After paying for the cablegrams, all he had left of the small remittance from the commissariat of his father were a few small silver coins. Again he was confronted with the crime of poverty; he had the yataghan, but he had not the fare for the voyage. Fortunately Brosie had some money — not only sixes and fours, but enough to pay for three passages to Port Elizabeth.

At half-past seven, in company with Brosie, he wandered back again to the national court, Brosie presaging a favorable verdict. Punctually at eight o'clock the crier summoned the jury from its seclusion.

The four good men filed along the aisle of the beleagured court and stood on the figured crimson carpet near where Eugene sat with his champions The intelligent men had not solved the subtleties of the theorem. They did not expect to do so until the grog was finished and at all events for another four hours, whereupon they were again sent back to the jury-room, after obtaining a grant of further alcoholic supplies from Grant J. The liberal supply which they had been in the first place allowed had run short, but they avowed that they found the stimulants a great incentive to their deliberations. Grant J. himself thought it might have the effect of stimulating their debating abilities, and adjourned the court, then illuminated with the fierce light which beat upon the throne in the shape of a tallow candle, until the hour of midnight.

Idling about the vicinity of the Fifth Avenue and the Mississippi Quays and counting the moments of the lingering hours, Eugene waited with Brosie until again the court assembled just before midnight, crowded to overflowing, as it had been every day during the hearing.

Every officer reappeared at his post, while the friend of Eugene and Wilmington, whom they had encountered in the hotel where the solicitor resided with his wife at the close of the month of March, appeared in the page 464uniform of a major of artillery after an evening's drill in the city garrison hall. His handsome form and soldierly mien conspicuous amongst the undress crowd and the be-robed and bob-wigged barristers of the national court, he stood beneath the glimmer of the lurid candle-light, flickering on the desk of the judge, and whispered to Eugene that the general public predicted a victory for him.

All stood, most of the audience in the dark, as his Honour entered, and again the whole court went through the ceremony of curtseying reflex obeisance.

"Summon the jury," said Judge Grant as he took his seat on the throne of Solon. In measured steps and in dead silence throughout the spacious building the crier marched to the door of the jury-room. He knocked. The door opened again, and the Supreme Court of the State of Louisiana defiled along the floor of the court, standing in line on the red carpet again.

"Gentlemen of the jury," said the judge, gleaming through the murky glimmer of the tallow candle: "have you arrived at your decision?"

Obadiah Slocum replied that the jury had decided.

"What say you as to the question—has the respondent, Eugene Percival Whitworth been for two years and upwards guilty of habitual intemperance?"

"Yes, yeroner," said the old Obadiah: "unanimous." Grant J. wrote down the answer, and Eugene started.

"What say you as to the question—has the respondent been for two years and upwards guilty of habitual cruelty?"

"Yes, yeroner," replied Slocum: "unanimous." Grant J. wrote down the answer. Eugene started and stared, fairly staggered. The judge questioned them if they meant habitual cruelty, and Obadiah Slocum replied that they did.

"What say you as to the question—has the respondent been guilty of adultery with Lillie Delaine, as stated in the affidavit accompanying the petition?"

"No, yeroner," said the old Obadiah: "unanimous," and Grant J. wrote down the answer with a smile.

"What say you as to the question—has the petitioner, Marvel Imogen Narramore Whitworth, by her return to the domicile of the respondent condoned the intemperance and cruelty?"

"No, yeroner," replied Slocum: "unanimous:" and Grant J. wrote down the answer.

"What say you as to the question—has the petitioner, by her own acts, contributed to any of the wrongs complained of in the petition?"

"No, yeroner," replied Obadiah Slocum: "unanimous." Grant J. wrote down the answer, and Eugene stared, petrified and as pale as death. The uncanny expression on his face as the appalling replies came from the foreman of the jury, all of whom had been so importunate for alcoholic supplies in the jury-room, was never seen there before or ever since. He looked with his eyes wide open up and down the line of those shame-faced page 465men, who turned their heads away from his astounded gaze. White with rage and disappointment, groaning under the sudden sense of a glaring injustice, he could have flown at the throats of every one of the inimical quartette and called him a liar then and there, while his barrister sa: bewildered and crest-fallen—a picture of discomfiture and dismay.

He heard the application of the bullying barristers for an immediate decree for dissolution. It was deferred. Stricken with anguish he paused.

Quickly came the dreaded corollary—the application for the hellish pendant to the decree or the concomitant order for the custody of his children. He heard the pronouncement of the judge postponing the delivery of his final ukase for another two days. Sufficient to the day was the evil thereof!

Still he stabbed the consciences of the jury with his fixing gaze, till hearing an order from the judge for the interim custody of the children by the petitioner, in case their father might take them away to the Cape of Good Hope out of the jurisdiction of the country, he sprang from his seat, without a word to his overwhelmed lawyer, and left the court.

He waited in agony of mind and the deepest abyss of despair till the ship came sailing into the harbour on the following evening with his ravished and invaluable treasures—the precious gems of his solicitude and the amulets of an undying love defying time and change: the charms of his chequered life and the reft fountains of his happiness—their very names the harmonious music of his soul.